# 186 How to sell managed AI agents as a service (recurring revenue)

If you use BOTH the following link and code COREY, you'll get your first 3 days of Orgo free, then 20% off your first 3 months: https://www.orgo.ai/?r=COREY I sat down with Phil Goodwin, a completely non-technical designer who sold his last business this past November and, just months later, built a managed AI agent business he now runs under the name Sidecar. Phil walks through his exact stack, how he prices setup fees and monthly per-agent retainers, and the "guinea pig" pitch he used to land his very first paying clients without a following or an email list. We get into real client use cases (a one-man directional drilling company, a short-form video editor), the group-chat trick he uses so clients actually learn to talk to their agent, and a dead-simple weekly value tracker that quantifies exactly why a client should keep paying every month. By the end of this episode, you'll have a working blueprint for pricing, pitching, and delivering a managed agent offer even if you've never written a line of code. Join our AI Operator Academy Community where we help entrepreneurs start and scale a profitable AI services business: https://www.skool.com/aioperatoracademy/about Timestamps 00:00 - Intro: The Promise of This Episode 00:41 - Phil's Non-Technical, Design-First Background 02:43 - What "Managed Agents" Actually Means 04:14 - Coaching Plus AI Employee, Not Plug-and-Play 05:31 - How Phil Built Agents for Himself, Then Friends 08:23 - Setup Fee Plus Per-Agent Pricing Model Explained 09:55 - Why "We Fix It Before You Notice" Is the Real Value Prop 11:53 - Real Client Use Cases Across Industries 12:30 - Drilling Company Client and the Telegram Group Chat Trick 15:21 - The Value Ledger: Tracking Hours and Dollars Saved Weekly 17:00 - Short-Form Video Editing Use Case 18:41 - Give Agents a Human-Readable Source of Truth, Not Just Markdown 19:53 - Finding First Clients Through Friends and Referrals 23:21 - Pick the Offer You Enjoy Fulfilling, Not Just the Lucrative One 24:31 - The Exact Text Phil Sends to Pitch Free "Guinea Pig" Work 26:29 - Pricing Breakdown: From $250/Month to a $1,500 Setup 29:37 - Should You Skip the Free Phase and Go Straight to Paid? 31:23 - Step One Advice: Pick Orgo and Land Your First Client 34:22 - Where to Find Phil and Sidecar Key Points Managed agents aren't plug-and-play. Phil's offer is a hybrid of coaching, consulting, and a deployed AI employee — he acts as the ongoing manager of the agent, not just the person who installed it, which is why clients pay a few grand a month instead of walking away after setup. Phil started by pricing pure infrastructure setups at $500, then raised it to $1,000, $1,500, and $2,000 as people kept saying yes — but he learned that handing off infrastructure without ongoing coaching causes clients to abandon the agent within weeks because they don't know how to talk to it. His current pricing model is a setup fee plus a per-agent monthly fee, a deliberate departure from flat unlimited-agent pricing (like the $5K/month unlimited model his podcast guest Nick uses) because most clients only need one or two agents, not unlimited access. The single most valuable "pro tip" from this episode: have the agent maintain a value ledger that logs every task it completes and assigns it a time and dollar value, then send the client a weekly report. One client saved 63 hours and $6,300 in his very first week — a number that makes churn almost impossible. Phil sets up a three-way Telegram group chat with himself, the client, and the agent, so the client can watch him interact with the agent and learn how to prompt it, while Phil can see exactly what tasks are being requested and coach in real time. Client acquisition ran entirely on free work and referrals — no social following required. Phil did free setups for close friends to get testimonials, and those friends referred him to paying clients in bigger cities, expanding a small-town Georgia network into clients across the country. Not every profitable offer is the right offer for you. Phil explicitly avoids multi-tool consulting and audits (the AI Concierge model) because it's not what he enjoys fulfilling — his advice is to find the intersection of what's lucrative and what you actually want to deliver. Orgo, an AI agent infrastructure platform - https://orgo.ai Watch Corey's prior episode with Nick, co-founder of Orgo, referenced in this conversation - https://www.youtube.com/@coreyganim Sidecar, Phil's managed AI agent service (Sidecar SMB, with an enterprise tier in development) - https://runsidecar.com FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://x.com/coreyganim Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/coreyganim/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreyganim/ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@coreyganim FIND PHIL ON SOCIAL Phil’s X: https://x.com/fhlcreative Sidecar Website: https://www.runsidecar.com/